


Promethea

by 20thcenturyvole



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: F/M, Transhumanism, a bit wobbly with the timeline on the aliens thing, clone murder, general ambiguous morality, speculative mad science, warning for non-graphic animal testing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/pseuds/20thcenturyvole
Summary: Quellcrist Falconer was born Nadia Makita, and this is how she stole fire from the gods.





	Promethea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Devilishdetails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devilishdetails/gifts).



> This fic brought to you by my rampant speculation about how stack technology even got off the ground in the first place, sparked by Develishdetails' prompt. Thanks to Io Mixit for being a great beta!

**1\. Pathfinding**

 

The terrorist known as Quellcrist Falconer is born Nadia Makita, and when she grows up she wants to be an astronaut.

A real one. A literal one. A star-voyager.

No, she’s not content to simply leave the atmosphere of her birth planet. It’s been done. It’s all been done. They’re confined to the orbit of this one little star, rocketing through space and dragging its attending bodies behind it, and she wants to break free. The sky is full of a billion suns whose warmth has never touched a human face. She wants to follow the old probes out beyond the bounds of the heliosphere, and find the edges of a new one.

The closest stars are in Alpha Centauri. With current technology, it’s possible to build a ship that could sustain life for the whole voyage there and back.

With current technology, the voyage there would take a hundred years.

 

*

 

Nadia spends her childhood devouring every scrap of knowledge she can get about space exploration. First the history books, then the textbooks, then the cutting-edge theory. She catalogues every known roadblock: fuel efficiency, rocket speed, equipment degradation, human endurance. Physical endurance. Mental endurance. Longevity. Decay.

That’s it, she decides, in her first year of college. The problem isn’t the ships - the ships can make it. It’s humans.

It would take a hundred years to reach the orbit of, say, Proxima Centauri B, a potentially habitable exoplanet. A hundred years more to get back. That’s the estimate  for highly trained individuals at peak physical fitness, hand-picked for their expertise and mental toughness. To get so far away, only a generation ship could carry out a manned mission. The human body experiences a spectrum of physical deterioration after mere months in space - what would a lifetime do? Are the astronauts bound for Alpha Centauri meant to breed with one another, hope for no complications, train their children and children’s children, and then die with the assumption that some day, after they and everyone they know is dead, their descendents will see a foreign star? Are those descendents then meant to turn around and make the return journey, leaving the only world they know? Will they be forced to dispassionately procreate within their own shrinking gene pool, so that their descendents can leave Proxima Centauri behind them in search of a star that they in turn have never seen before, and land at last on the planet of their great-great-grandmothers?

She pictures what the returning crew would look like, and imagines the final insult as the gravity of Earth crushes their weak, brittle-boned, space-born bodies.

It’s so far past unacceptable she won’t even consider it. She’s going to find a better way.

Nadia makes her own niche in neurology, studying robotics and engineering on the side. Here’s a fact: almost every cell of the human body gets replaced over time. Some cells are replaced every day, some are replaced every year, some take even longer, but eventually you’ll wake up in a body wholly different from the one you had a few years back. You’ll have eyes that never saw your childhood home. Lips your first lover never kissed. Bones that have never broken, though they bear the memory of breaking. Like the ship of Theseus, you’re new in every part and yet the same.

But not everything changes. There are some cells in the brain that remain the same from the cradle to the grave. Their precious nature is what makes diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s so fearsome. Damage to these cells is irreversible, because they are irreplaceable.

Nadia has the spark of an idea.

 

*

 

Nadia gets very good at networking. Not just in the programming sense, though she is excellent at that too - but, no, she figured out early on that she needs contacts. Allies. Experts in fields in which she is only a starry-eyed journeyman. By the age of 30, she has assembled her first real resources: advanced degrees in neuroscience, engineering, and chemistry, a network of contacts from universities the world over, a handful of assistants talented in a variety of fields, and a lab of her own.

Her first goal is to map her own brain to create a functional AI, an artificial twin of herself at the time of mapping, which can be stored, transferred, and connected to an interface. If she accomplishes nothing else in her life, this will have been a bare minimum of good enough: a version of her that might outlive her fragile body, and set new eyes on another sun.

Mapping a human consciousness in this way is - well, it’s never been done. There are roughly 80 billion neurons in the human brain, not to mention support systems in the brain itself and organs that affect mood and function scattered around the rest of the body. No artificial intelligence has ever approached that level of sophistication and complexity; even the most advanced AIs still don’t satisfy stringent criteria for true consciousness, and in any case she is not satisfied that code is the right path. She thinks that it would be more worthwhile to pursue something more organic: complex though they may be, functioning human brains are, after all, little more than a chemical soup with questions.

So she starts small. In brutally simple terms, she maps animal brains of increasing sophistication and sentience, programs AIs with those neurological maps, and plugs them into robot bodies to test them... though ‘program’ isn’t quite the right word for what she makes. Her first effort was more like a tank of protein gel with outsized artificial neurons stacked on top of one another, bolted to a 4M kit with a portable aerosol scattering sensor on the front. It was a little outsized - given that she was mapping the brain of an ant - but it wasn’t bad for her first year of college. What matters is that this tank of artificial ant brain, when given the appropriate stimuli, behaved exactly like an ant, and won her grants, and interest from the right people.

Over time, she moves onto increasingly complex lifeforms, managing to replicate their instinctive and learned behaviors. Her favourite kind of test is a side-by-side stimulus comparison, wherein the original subject and its duplicate, with no way of interacting with one another or even being aware of one another’s presence, is presented with identical scenarios to test for reaction. In cases of successful mapping, the original and duplicate both respond the same way to stimuli: showing preference for the same foods, approaching given handlers the same way, showing understanding of the same tasks. They are, reliably, the same creature.

Of course, more complex brains comes with behavioural complications. Attaching the artificial brains to robot bodies works for ants, and spiders, and even fish - and the mechanical bodies are themselves quite beautiful pieces of engineering - but they become problematic when attached to more complex creatures, and begin to seriously skew the results. It is difficult to test the memory of an artificial bird if that bird is distracted by its new body. It’s not a complete roadblock - the adjustment period can be taken into account - but she has to develop sideways into creating holographic environments that fool the copies into thinking they still have their original bodies.

It’s a problem. She herself has no problem with the thought of winding up in an inhuman body - the one she was born with has bad eyesight and a genetic predisposition to colorectal cancer, and she’d trade it in for a robot of her own design in a heartbeat - but they are still a long way off from copying a human brain. Right now, her greatest achievement is getting a flock of copied chickens to replicate their original pecking order when she plugged them into a glorified computer game environment. The process needs to be refined with other mammals before she can hope to copy herself. It’s not like they haven’t refined the copying process: they started with brain scans and a painstaking process of neural pathfinding, like a jigsaw puzzle from hell. Then they found ways to speed up the pathfinding process. Then they found ways to automate it. Now, she needs to refine how the copied brain interfaces with its new body.

One of her original partners in this endeavor, Doctor Fatima Al Zair, has the breakthrough. She’s a veterinary neurosurgeon by specialty - Nadia would never have gotten so far with animal testing without her - and Dr. Al Zair has the idea to try interfacing the copied brains with donor bodies. The apparatus to do so is large and clumsy at first, but the results are truly intriguing.

They starts with rats: a copied consciousness interfaced with other specimens both live and recently deceased. Copying to a live specimen works, as long as the higher brain functions are suppressed. Copying to a braindead specimen works equally well, as long as the body and autonomic functions have not begun to decay. Through refining the chemical matrix, they have accumulated and stored hundreds of copied animal consciousnesses that have outlasted the maximum lifespan of their original subjects without degradation. Through this method, they are able to test rats, parrots, dogs, monkeys, and even bonobos.

The transfer to a physical body requires direct contact with the subject’s brain, and it is through refining the interface to make it less obtrusive that Nadia and Fatima develop stack technology. The surgical procedure is delicate in the extreme, but Fatima doesn’t disappoint her, and soon they are able to experiment with transferring the stacks from body to body, checking the continuity of consciousness, and Nadia stops thinking of the subjects that receive the stacks as anything but… new suits. Like swapping outfits on a doll.

It’s here, though, that they run into an interesting wrinkle: unlike in machine interfaces, transferring a copied brain from organic body to organic body multiple times seems to lead to a degradation of the consciousness. The neurons start to disconnect and die off, leading to erratic behaviour in later bodies. It’s concerning, and Nadia is not certain why it happens. Her best theory is that the brain of the receiving body interferes with the stack consciousness in some way - confuses it. Overlays responses. Disintegrates the sense of self. 

Ultimately, though, she’s not convinced that it’s a relevant concern. There’s no way they’d even be able to test this phenomenon on humans - not barring a legal miracle, anyway - and she is personally planning to continue on in a machine body, once her original wears out. That has always been the plan.

Obviously, Nadia’s research isn’t secret. Between publications and peer consultations, that’s impossible. Some of her initial breakthroughs were reported by the media too, but that was years ago - puff pieces, mostly. Her more recent advancements provoke as much controversy as fascination, and that spills out into the public sphere.

There is, to put it bluntly, a firestorm of controversy about the ethical ramifications of copied consciousness. It rages higher with every step she takes towards completing her goal. Word spreads of her plans to move on to mammal brains. The theoretical debates about the ethics of twinning a human mind collide with practical debates about whether animal rights apply to artificial animals, and inflame one another.

Such controversies have happened before, whenever strides are taken in the enhancement of the human condition: IVF, cloning, stem cell research, gene editing - all have weathered their storms. The world adjusts to its new reality in time. Nadia pays exactly as much attention to these debates as she needs to, and no more. They tell her that the world is paying attention to her successes, and taking them seriously, but she knew that already: from her peers, from her NASA contacts, and from the sheer amount of espionage attempts she must occupy her time foiling.

A large part of her research is actually open source - the more minds on this project, the better. Nadia  doesn’t particularly care whether another space programme accomplishes interstellar travel first. She wouldn’t even care that much if she is not one of the first voyagers, although, admittedly, it would sting.

However, Nadia does care about companies attempting to patent robotic versions of deceased pets using a bad knock off of her technology - or, worse, copies of dead relatives. Selling her ideas as the ultimate life insurance. Quite apart from their poor understanding of her methods, she finds the idea… crass.

She will admit, also, that she dislikes corporate methods of getting at her more protected research. Laboratories have been broken into. Equipment has been stolen. At one point, Nadia was even honey potted. In her defense, she hadn’t flattered herself enough to expect that angle, but still, it stung. He’d been handsome, and charming, and so interested in her work. She credits him and him alone with her taste for men who don’t ask her probing questions.

 

*

 

And then, there are her donors.

Nadia can’t afford to ignore donors. She is funded by a complex web of grant money, with some income from patents on the side, but it’s never quite enough. She can afford to pay the salaries of a handful of people, but there are so many others with whom Nadia has traded favours and research collaboration, and if she could afford to _hire_ all of those brilliant minds to work for her full-time…Well, it would make it worth her while to glad-hand with the rich and curious.

Some of these donors have unrealistic expectations, and Nadia loses out by disabusing them of their ideas (she can only weather so many inane conversations about cryogenics). Others, however, show a better understanding of what she’s trying to achieve. Their motives may not be hers, but it’s not as if she can keep her technology out of their hands - there’ll be no putting the genie back in the bottle - so she sees no reason not to get them on her side now.

“Do you understand,” says Marion Blumenthal, “that what you are proposing is functional immortality?” She smiles at Nadia like she finds her the most fascinating person in the room. Nadia is old enough to know she’s being flattered, but not cynical enough that she can’t enjoy it.

Marion Blumenthal is the matriarch of the Blumenthal dynasty; they own a bank, a law firm, and vast tracts of property along the east coast of the United States and the south of France. One of her sons is the Governor of Maine. Tonight, she is the hostess of a fundraiser at Nadia’s alma mater, and Nadia has taken a night away from the lab to do what she must.

Nadia raises her glass. “It’s only immortality,” she demurs, “If you believe that a copy of yourself is you. Many would worry about something fundamental being lost in translation.”

Marion laughs, a gentle, spirited sound. Nadia admires how natural it sounds - she assumes it takes a lot of practice to sound so pleasant. Marion says, “You sound so cautious! I thought that would be my line. You’re not selling your project very hard.”

“I don’t like to give false promises,” Nadia says.

“Is that modesty,” Marion says, “Or doubt?”

Nadia is herself very practised. “Never doubt.” She keeps her voice friendly, but firm. “I would hardly have gotten this far or garnered so much support if my research did not show continuous promise. It’s more of a philosophical question, and one that everyone in the world will have to ask themselves, when this technology comes to fruition. I aim for a continuity of consciousness that can outlive my body. But would it be me, or just some _thing_ that believes it’s me?”

“Hmm.” Marion assesses her. “Do _you_ believe it? That a copy of your brain is you, I mean.”

“Our tests are promising,” Nadia says. “They point to a continuity of individuated behavior even in higher-order mammals which indicates that our mapping process is reliably successful. Of course, the brain is not the only factor in behavior, and we have had to take into account how even things like gut bacteria can have a major impact on--”

“Doctor Makita,” Marion interrupts. Nadia closes her mouth. The interruption is… rude, but she confines her consternation to a raised eyebrow. Marion’s gaze is steady. “I suppose what I’m asking is: do you believe that some… artificial copy of yourself will still want the things you want? That this copy will have your goals? Your drive?”

Her eyes, lined with fine wrinkles and set deep in her immaculately made-up face, burn.  She doesn’t blink. Nadia doesn’t either.

After a moment of thought, Nadia says, “I want to visit another star. I’ve wanted it all my life - a childish whim that grew into a purpose. To leave the orbit of Sol and go out there into the heliopause, into the wide galaxy is, right now, impossible in one lifetime. That want - that drive - is something I consider fundamental to myself. If I make a copy of myself and it does not share that drive, is it me? I don’t believe so. But then, our wants and drives are a product of our lived experiences, our memories, associations, and neuroses - unique neural pathways. In other words: if I made a copy of myself that didn’t share my goals, it would have to be because I made a hash of the job.”

Marion chuckles, and breaks eye contact.

Nadia smiles at her, and feels her spine relax. She continues, keeping her voice light, “Still: desires can change. People move on - priorities shift with age and experience. That’s normal. So suppose I copy myself perfectly, and go on to see a different sun. Will the me that returns be different from the me that left? Of course. That’s life.”

“That’s life,” Marion echoes. She raises her glass. “We may change our minds, but may we never waver in our ambitions. I hope you see your other sun.”

Marion Blumenthal becomes Nadia’s sponsor, and soon Nadia has all the funding she could ever need.

 

*

 

Nadia is fifty-four when she finally constructs her stack.

With practically limitless funds, and the largest part of the work already done, the last decade has been spent in endless refinement of the technology. Nadia is a long way from tanks full of outsized ant brains: now, a complex primate consciousness can fit inside a 3D-printed wedge of silicone and hydroxyapatite no bigger than an intervertebral disc, and she is about to become the first human to receive one.

Nadia feels no fear, going under. Fatima is one of the finest neurosurgeons on earth, and certainly one of the most specialised. Nadia hand-picked this surgical crew. Fatima tells her to count backwards from 10, and she’s out.

Nadia wakes up in the recovery suite, feeling drug-muffled and groggy. Her neck is very stiff, but that’s alright. She can’t move it anyway. It’s immobilised in a brace, and will be for at least two weeks, or until Fatima says otherwise. But above her, in the overhead screen, she sees her pathfinder program blossoming with pale strings of light.

It’s her own neural pathways, being mapped and written onto the device in her neck in real time, and Nadia almost cries. She’s startled by the strength of her reaction. Her eyes sting, and she beams, a smile so wide and helpless that she can’t smother it. The feeling of achievement - of witnessing a dream in the process of being realised - is so profound as to almost overwhelm her, and she has to close her eyes to it.

She hears a knock, and the door to her suite opens while she’s still struggling to compose herself. Fatima appears in her field of vision, and when she sees Nadia’s face she beams too, like a proud sister. “How are you feeling?” she asks.

“If you tell anyone I cried,” Nadia rasps, “I’ll say you drugged me.”

Fatima cackles, and then sits with her to watch the artificial neurons pile up, light on light on light.

It takes two more months, for Nadia to heal completely and for tests to be completed to her satisfaction. Two more months, and then they go public with the results.

 

* * *

 

  
**2\. To the Stars**

 

Nadia Makita is sixty seven years old when she joins the crew of Chiron 1. Their mission: to make the long journey to Proxima Centauri B, land if possible, gather as much data as they can, deploy probes and landers and then turn around and come home. With advances in spaceflight technology, it will be a safe, boring journey lasting no more than one hundred and seventy-eight years.

Nadia is so excited she could just about die.

There are five other crew members: Brahnn, McMartin, Ito, Nguyen, and White. She has already known Nguyen and McMartin for years. Ito is very young, but excited by Nadia’s technology. White and Brahnn are veterans of the International Space Station, used to the long dark weeks above the Earth.

Nadia creates the bodies for their journey herself. Organic bodies are out of the question, of course, but the joy of robotic engineering comes back to her. Working with a team of NASA scientists, she makes beautiful creatures of aluminium and silicone, articulated, hardy, easily repaired - and deliberately inhuman. A perfect copy of herself isn’t necessary or even particularly useful for their mission, and besides, she has no wish to experience the uncanny valley effect from the other side.

The bodies won’t even be in use for most of the mission. Nadia and the rest of the crew will spend most of their journey disconnected from any physical form, waking up three at a time in periodic cycles weeks or months apart, or when there is some emergency that requires physical intervention. The bodies are more like drones, or vehicles.

On the day of launch, Nadia wakes up in her new body. Vision comes online, then audio. She can see herself - her other self, human and old and smiling. “It’s time,” her other self says, but Nadia is aware of that, and more preoccupied with final tests of proprioception, and with seeing the others in the hanger awaken. She is pleased at the results, and nods to her original self. Without the glands of an organic body, she doesn’t feel quite the surge and fizz that her original must feel, but that level of rationality can only help the mission.

Still, her metaphorical heart is glad as she steps out before the crowd and press. In places of honour are her colleagues and donors: Marion Blumenthal, in her nineties but not the least worried of her body failing, thanks to the stack in her neck. Her son behind her, equally insured - he has been instrumental in pushing through legislation about stack technology. Fatima and her original self, standing side by side and waving. Select members of her staff. Brahnn, McMartin, Ito, Nguyen, and White - their original selves, anyway.

It’s a pity that Nadia’s parents didn’t live to see this. They were always so supportive of her when she was young. She still regrets that she did not perfect stack technology before her father died. She still regrets - and is still baffled by - her mother’s refusal to accept one.

Nadia supposes it’s not strange to have a moment of such morbid introspection right now, but it is a distraction. The project director’s speech finishes. People are applauding. It’s time to get on the ship and go.

 

*

 

The Chiron 1 is not like any manned space vehicle that has ever left Earth before, and not just because it’s bound for another star system. It carries no food, because the crew don’t need any. They also don’t need air or water, and their bodies can tolerate much more extreme temperatures than human bodies can - only the stacks themselves need to be kept within a particular temperature range, and heating coils can do that.

There is one part of the ship that does have water, though, and air at a constant, stable pressure, and a steady, Earth-like cycle of temperature fluctuation. It’s a garden, in the centre of the ship. It is for them. The scientists at NASA insisted. Brahnn and White, the veterans, insisted.

It makes sense, Nadia supposes. The psychological benefits of gardening are well documented, as are the strange behaviors of those kept long from the natural world. It’s the reason submarine crews are said to haunt the sonar room for the sounds of whale song. This crew’s predecessors at NASA have written odes to zinnia and exulted over space-grown lettuce. Still, she’s surprised that they are allotting precious space and resources to this garden, and a little rueful for feeling such surprise.

Nadia has spent her whole life looking at brains and how they work, and she is here in the first place so that she can monitor, research and maintain all of their minds during the long journey. And yet, up until she saw that garden, she hadn’t truly considered the psychological effects of the journey. Well. She’s about to get first hand experience.

 

*

 

She does not expect to dream.

A stack is not exactly like a brain, and a stack’s disconnection from sensory apparatus is not analogous to sleep. There’s no metabolic waste to scrub out at the end of the day - theoretically, they could stay awake in these artificial forms for as long as they like. Still, none of them are expected to be alert for two hundred years. A great many of the ship’s systems are automated, and to be awake that whole time would mean having to be entertained that whole time. There’s only so much space on their servers for books, games, and media. They are cycled up in shifts, three at a time, sometimes for a few hours to receive updates, sometimes for full days of work before they cycle down again. Still, the days add up. The weeks add up. The years add up.

Nadia is a bit embarrassed by how little in her life really prepared her for this experience. Of course, she has gone through extensive training, but… it turns out it really is very different to see the Earth from space. And it’s rather breathtaking to see Mars. They slingshot around Jupiter for momentum, and its eternal storms and many moons are beyond what pictures or even footage could possibly communicate. She’s on her way out of the solar system on her way to another star, like she always wanted, but now she wishes, how she _wishes_ , that she could stop and spend a few months on every moon of Jupiter.

It’s humbling to admit, even to herself, that she never felt awe at anything that wasn’t her own work before.

Nadia never touched a garden in her life, and now she looks forward to the half-hour she is allotted every cycle, to spend time using her four extremely sensitive and precisely articulated limbs to prune the bonsai trees. The only familiar part of gardening is the camaraderie she feels with her fellow crew members when she sees the work they have done on those trees - the delicate shaping of the canopies, and the healthy growth of the miniature limbs tells her that they give as much care and attention to the plants as she does, and that feeling, of all bright minds focused on a single goal, is a comfort like no other. She misses her team. She wonders what they’re doing. She wonders if her other self has died yet, and what body she’s in now.

It makes her very grateful for the company of the rest of this crew. Especially when they pass Pluto, and drift out into the long black night.

Nadia dreams. She didn’t expect to dream.

She dreams of flowers, sometimes. She dreams of being so small she could walk under the cap of a mushroom on the forest floor. Pine needles are the size of fallen trees. Ants are the size of terriers. They wave their antennae at her and scamper away. The trees are so high up, they might as well belong to another world. A bee crawls into the cup of a crocus flower, which bends under its weight, sending golden pollen raining down to dust her arms and hands.

Her body comes online, and she remembers her last feeling as joy.

This cycle, it is Nadia, Brahnn, and Ito. After maintenance checks, here is very little to do with their scheduled hours. Brahnn is writing a book. Ito chats to Nadia for a while about a novel she is reading, which Nadia has also read - nine years ago, now. Then, Ito goes to the garden, nodding her aluminium head to Nadia as they pass in the hall. Nadia is going out. Ito knows. They all do it. It is not for inspection. It is for no purpose, but all of them do it.

She attaches a cord, cycles the lock, and steps out into the void between stars.

There is so little light. Her artificial eyes adjust, adjust, adjust, until she can see the stars, but there is no sun. Every source of warmth is so far from here. She could not be farther without leaving the galaxy altogether. It is truly remarkable, how she can be an artificial mind in an artificial body, physically incapable of panic, and yet feel such a deep and constant terror.

She has no mouth, as her voice is synthesized, and she communicates with the other members of the crew through an intranet. But now, with nobody to hear her and no medium to carry the sound, she turns on her speakers and with a mechanised voice gives a full-throated scream into the dark.

 

*

 

As they enter the heliosphere of Proxima Centauri, all six of them cycle on.

In silence, they watch the star approach. It’s a red dwarf, and silhouetted against it, sitting in its habitable zone, is Proxima Centauri B. They are going to go down to that planet. All six of them are going to touch its foreign soil.

They reach out with their mechanical limbs, wordlessly. They grasp each other, and hold on for a long time, until they must break and get to work.

 

*

 

They pick up considerable momentum from the orbit of an outer planet. By agreement, they all cycle up for the new sights: exoplanets previously unseen, moons no telescope picked out before. They spend a whole week analysing the data from a cloud of debris they determine must have been a planet before something catastrophic happened. This system is beautiful.

In the garden, Nadia and McMartin clip the bonsai trees. They are such venerable little things, the ones that have survived the ninety years it took to get here, as perfect and charming as a forest in a woodblock print. Nadia has carved little miniature figures from all of the branches they pruned. White likes to move them around every week, creating dioramas - little pastoral dramas playing out at the rate of one frame per week.

“I want,” McMartin says suddenly. Nadia is startled to hear his voice; he has turned on his speakers, so his synthesised voice can travel through the garden’s atmosphere. “I want to walk on the ground. I want to feel gravity again. I miss…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. Nadia reaches over, and grasps the top of his limb. “I know,” she says. “It won’t be long now.”

With Proxima Centauri B only months away, Nguyen launches the probes that will tell them if landing is possible. They wait. Then, after three excruciating weeks, a flood:

Proxima Centauri B is geologically stable, with an atmosphere and weather patterns. A large amount of its surface appears to be water ice, with smaller liquid seas. The pictures show mountain ranges and deserts, but also patches of yellow and green at the equator. They’re still all gasping at the pictures and speculating rampantly when the lander data comes in: gravity 1.2 Earth normal; a stable magnetosphere; air somewhat too high in carbon monoxide to support human life, but not high in anything that will corrode them or their equipment; temperatures at the equator hovering around 23.3 degrees centigrade. Bacteria. Fungus. Plant life.

All six of them board the lander. There’s no reason for anyone to stay on Chiron 1, with its systems automated and course set. Alpha Centauri B has an orbital period of about 11 Earth days; the plan is to park the Chiron in the planet’s orbit, wait until they’re most of the way around the sun, and then hit the gas and let Proxima Centauri fling them back towards Sol like a stone from a sling - a classic gravity assist.

They may as well spend those few days exploring.

The six of them, their bodies showing the wear and tear of a century’s gentle use, attach themselves to a reusable rocket and descend to the surface of an alien planet. Chatter is minimal. They keep their eyes fixed on the readouts.

The rocket rattles as they hit atmosphere, and so do they, their metal and silicone bodies vibrating violently with their descent. For a moment, Nadia has a flash of irrational fear as she pictures their stacks being rattled right out of alignment and disconnecting all of them from their bodies at the worst possible moment, despite the, collectively, several years she spent making sure that very thing could not happen, but then the rocket thumps and thumps again and the ride smoothes out. “Coming in,” Brahnn says. “Touchdown in twelve minutes.”

Then, “Landing site is in view. Four minutes.”

Then, “Setting her down.”

Nguyen is the first out of the rocket. “Oh,” he says, and that’s all.

Proxima Centauri B is beautiful. The sky is a lush lilac colour. The sun, so large in the sky, passes behind snaking clouds high in the atmosphere. There are mountains in the distance capped with snow, and at their feet lie strange forests whose canopies bow and ripple in the wind. From this distance it is hard to judge the size of those trees, but some seem very tall. Here and there, there is a jewel-like glint of water. Everything is subtly in motion.

One by one, they exit the rocket, and step out of its shadow. McMartin presses himself to the ground, sweeping his digits back and forth across it, sending up a sigh and whisper of dirt tumbling over itself. Nobody censures him. Nadia shifts her treads, feeling the texture of the ground beneath them, and for a second fancies herself a tree taking root in the soil. She didn’t design this body to smile, but she lets out a little hum instead, and by now the rest of the crew know what that means.

“What’s that sound?” Ito says. “Is that just wind? Wind sounds so lovely. I’d forgotten.”

Nadia cranks her hearing up. She’s gotten so used to silence; even in the garden, with air for sound to travel through, she rarely heard anything but the snip of her shears and the quiet whir of her own servos. She has, quite genuinely, forgotten the sound of wind in the trees. Her memories aren’t video or audio files - they’re fuzzy and distant and overlaid with ninety years of tedium.

There is the rush and sigh of air moving over ground and through plants, but under that voiceless sound there’s another vibration, a tone like a struck crystal, or a bowed violin. “Insects?” she suggests.

“Could be,” Brahnn says. “Alright, everyone. In the pattern we planned. Go carefully, stay in sight, and record everything.”

In the end, it’s Nadia herself who finds the ruins. They’re tucked under the treeline, consumed by time and the forest. She wouldn’t have noticed them at all, ground down almost to nothing, but she was following the sound and found a low and crumbling wall in the vast and resonating shadow of the songspire tree.

It is incredibly tall, and spreads its silver branches wide, hung with blue crystals that vibrate in harmony. They spend twenty-six hours beneath it.

The tree is not really a tree, but it does seem to be a natural formation. The wall, however, is exactly what it seems to be, and part of a larger structure that time has ground down to its foundations. They take measurements. They carbon-date. The ruin is tens of thousands of years old. Their sensors give no indication of anything larger or more complex than bugs on this planet, and they certainly haven’t encountered any. No beasts walk. No birds sing. Just this tree.

Nadia feels her heart break, just a little bit. She came with no expectation whatsoever of meeting an alien civilisation, but to know one existed, and for it and humanity to have missed each other by such a scant handful of time - a geological eyeblink! - seems a bitter thing.

"Must have been a mass extinction event," murmurs White. "If there's not even terrestrial animals left. Like the Great Dying. I wonder what caused it?"

The days they have are not enough, nor would another ninety years be. They take what measurements and samples they can carry. They get back on the rocket. They rejoin Chiron 1. Then they head home.

 

*

 

Three years later, after they have finished cataloguing the data from the planet, Nadia sits with Nguyen in the garden. “Is this it?” he says abruptly. “We just go home and hand everything over? What then?”

Nadia puts down her tools. She knows Nguyen knows the mission outline as well as she does. “What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” Nguyen says. “Do I just keep existing like this? Unplug from my body and sit on a shelf and dream of the trees on another world?”

She shrugs. “Maybe you could stay in your body,” she says.

“Maybe,” Nguyen says. “Maybe something catastrophic has happened while we’ve been gone and the infrastructure we’re relying on doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“That’s definitely possible,” Nadia observes dryly.

“I remember thinking it didn’t matter, because I was technically staying behind, do you know that? I remember thinking of this as something like donating my expertise without risking my body. Like that was the most important part of me. But my body doesn’t matter,” he says. “I like this one. I could have another one. I don’t care.”

“It’s just a sleeve for your mind,” she murmurs.

“I don’t think I want to live forever,” he says.

Nadia looks at him. She doesn’t know what to say. “I,” she says. Then, “I don’t think I do either.”

Nguyen slumps, and she knows it is what relief looks like in that expressionless body. “I just feel like I’ve gone on so long, you know?” At her gesture: “Like I’ve seen so much. And thought so much. And now I just want to stop, the way I remember how I used to want sleep.” He nods. “When this is over. Nadia. I think I’d like to stop. Take me out. Put me on a shelf. Let me dream.”

Nadia feels so light. She lays a careful hand over the canopy of their bonsai forest, feeling the prickle of their tiny leaves. She had not expressed such a thought to anyone, and she feels immeasurable relief that someone has done it for her. To stop, yes, seems sweet. The universe is so full of things, of endless beauty, but she can’t devour it all, and even if she could, she doesn’t think she wants to. Could she live long enough to get bored of beauty? Of discovery? Of other people? She has lived long enough that she can see it, a distant monstrous shape on the horizon.

To die too young is a tragedy, yes - one her technology has, she hopes, made avoidable for all mankind. But now she thinks to live too long is an equal one. Better to die when one’s time is up, than live to grow contemptuous of life.

 

* * *

 

  
**3\. Send Envoys Seeking Earth and Water**

 

They return to Earth eventually.

Sol grows from an undistinguished star to a guiding beacon, and they look at it with bleak wonder. Past the Kuiper belt, they send a message. Every one of them reacts with surprise when they get a response: a voice they don’t recognise, coming out of the darkness to welcome them home.

It doesn’t take a genius to pin down why it’s so overwhelming to hear that voice. After all this time, they could almost believe they were they only six beings alive in the universe.

At Saturn, they meet a ship, the Lamassu. It’s not a long chat, but it’s startling, and illuminating. Lamassu is a research vessel, swinging by the gas giant on a trajectory back inward towards the sun. “Back home to Earth?” White asks.

The captain laughs. “Back home to Ganymede!” they say. “We’ll deliver our report and they’ll likely send us back out here with a mining outfit. It’ll keep the lights on, that’s for sure!”

They’re a research vessel for a mining corporation that has stretched its hand out beyond even the asteroid belt. They leave the Chiron 1 with a picture the captain took, of four crewmembers bunched together and grinning. They’re all human, soft-skinned and expressive, faces lined and marked in varied ways.

Nadia’s mind is spinning at the implications. “Perhaps we’ll have a chance to catch up on history before we reach Earth,” she says.

“Damn well hope so,” Brahnn says.

At Jupiter, they see cities under glass on the surfaces of Ganymede and Europa, and ships swarming in their orbit. An elaborate station hangs above Jupiter itself like an eightieth moon. It looks like the cover of an Asimov novel. “Oh,” says White, forlornly.

 _We’re time travellers_ , Nadia realises. We’re relics of a distant past. It’s not like she hadn’t known. She just hadn’t hardened herself to it like she thought. Maybe one day, she thinks, I will have grown impossible to surprise. It doesn’t seem likely at this point, though.

They are greeted far more brusquely here, but someone does take enough pity to send them a few books, from which they learn a lot about the social structure of Earth in the present day. They read the figures. They go through events, and parse the timeline. At first, their discussion is careful and measured, but a consensus emerges quite naturally.

They’re appalled.

“Is it us?” Ito says. “Do we just not like it because it’s different from what we know?”

There is silence as they give this its due consideration. “No,” Nadia says eventually. They all look at her. She feels cold with shame.

“No,” Nguyen agrees.

They are intercepted between Mars and Earth, by a private ship. There’s no NASA anymore - they were replaced by private entities long ago. The Chiron docks, and the difference between the Earth vessel and their home is as striking as the difference between a porcelain vase and a crumpled beer can. The Earth ship is as sleek as an orca, and four times the Chiron's size. The Chiron is almost two hundred years old, bearing the scars of space debris from here to Alpha Centauri and back, its last reserves almost spent.

Nadia doesn’t know whether these people are going to view her ship as a museum piece or as floating trash. But that doesn’t matter now. Things are all coming to an end, as they must. She thinks about Nguyen’s request, and thinks about how nice it might be to join him, sitting on a shelf, dreaming of singing trees.

They gather in their loose ends, and all their precious data, their reports and footage edited for relevance and interest. They have cut it down to several thousand hours. People on this ship, the Erebus, eye them strangely - there are no conspicuous robots here, let alone any that have stacks attached, and it feels odd. She knows her other self is still alive. She is mentioned in the books. Did robotic engineering fall out of fashion? Did she lose her love for these functional bodies, when cloning became ubiquitous?

Maybe her robotics hobby just fell by the wayside when stack technology took off, because that is everywhere. “Oh yes,” their attache says, from Nadia’s own private company, sent to retrieve them. She looks as smooth as a doll, her hair perfect, her smile bright. Nadia has to wonder if that's the body she was born in. “The insertion of a cortical stack is opt-out, not opt-in. Your work, Doctor Makita, is the backbone of society. Thanks to you, no tragic accident, fatal illness, or vicious attack need cut a life short. With stack technology, there is time enough for all a life can contain.” She tilts her head, and for a moment she sounds less like she is reciting a script. “You gave us immortality, Doctor Makita. I suppose I didn’t realise until now that this version of you had no way of knowing just how successful you really were.”

I just wanted to go to the stars, Nadia thinks. “I suppose that’s true,” she says, as neutral as only a synthesised voice in an expressionless body can be.

They descend through the atmosphere of Earth in a smaller ship, every bit as sleek and shining. The planet is so heatbreakingly beautiful that none of them can tear their eyes away. In silence, they exclaim to one another over the shapes of continents below, the seeming cellophane-thinness of the atmosphere, the changes they can see in shorelines and urban sprawls, sending signals each to each like there’s still no medium for sound to travel in. The attache sits on the other side of the cabin and watches them all, a faint and friendly smile playing around her mouth. Stacked in the back of the ship, too travel-worn to complement their surroundings, Nadia’s crew ignore their handler.

As the ship flies over thick cumulus, there is an audible _ping_ and the attache says, “Ah! We’re coming in to land.”

Confusion halts their silent conversation. They’re nowhere near the ground. And then--

To port, a spire of glass pierces the clouds, and the ship swoops towards it, glides into the open maw of a hanger bay, and comes to rest. The doors hiss open, and the attache smiles, and stands. “Allow me to take you to your final destination,” she says, and turns away.

Nadia knows where they are. Oh, she doesn’t recognise this place at all, but she knows what’s coming. Nguyen and McMartin each grasp one of her limbs and then let go. They are together, and Nadia is not afraid. Their treads buzz along the tile and carpet. She doesn’t like carpet, she decides. She wants to feel soil beneath her feet.

Doctor Nadia Makita of Earth is waiting for them, her arms open.

She looks lovely. Lovelier than they ever looked when they were truly that young. Her hair is styled more artfully than they ever cared to do. Her lips are fuller than Nadia remembers, her body more toned and sleek than laboratory life ever truly allowed. She looks like a fantasy version of herself.

The laws on cloning changed a lot while Nadia was gone. They read about it, in the books from Jupiter. The idea of a cloned person as a person in their own right has been discarded. Bodies are not sacred things, nor brains as such. Only stacks. Only the immortal. Nadia did that.

“Amazing,” the other Nadia murmurs, stepping close. “I’d almost forgotten what I made. You must have gone through so many replacement parts.” She presses a hand to Nadia’s aluminum carapace, and that point of contact burns with heat. “I can’t believe I sent you out in these old hunks. I’m almost embarrassed.”

Insult roils through the crew’s silent connection. “They worked,” Nadia replies.

Her other self laughs. “I suppose they were the best I could do at the time. Well, never mind.” She gestures at a wall, and it lights up with footage from Alpha Centauri B. “At least the mission was a success! Maybe I’ll go there myself one day.”

“One day,” Nadia echoes.

“There’s no rush,” her other self says blithely, “and the concerned parties will auction the territory in the coming months. Oh, but why am I telling you this?” and suddenly Nadia can’t move.

Five frantic signals bounce to her: they are all immobilised. Nadia feels anger like a swallowing pit. Her shame is depthless. Her other self moves to White and unceremoniously removes his stack, tossing it on a nearby table. In Nadia’s mind, McMartin’s voice is shrill with instruction. Her other self moves down the line to Ito, and begins the same process. Remove. Toss. Down the line, to McMartin.

“Thank you all for your service,” her other self says, distracted by the delicate disassembly of the heating coils around McMartin’s shoulder. McMartin has gone silent now, and Nadia is working as quickly as she can. “I’ll make an exhibit of the Chiron, I think. It’ll be a wonderful centrepiece for a gala. Gather the old crowd in. My first investors.” Pull. Toss. She moves to Nadia. “It would show how far this company’s come. How far we might still go." Nadia’s other self smiles a perfect smile. “Literally.”

McMartin’s override code kicks in. Nadia grabs her other self by the head, and before she can do anything - call out, struggle, look anything other than surprised - Nadia breaks her neck. Then she crouches low over the body, and with the delicacy she had previously used to clip miniature trees, she cuts open the back of her other self’s neck, pulls the stack out from between its vertebrae, and crushes it.

She carefully gathers up the three tossed chips, and sends the override code to Nguyen and Brahnn. They look silently at the body, and at her.

“She lived too long,” Nadia says. “All of them lived too long, and now they see…” She shakes her head.

“Nothing,” Brahnn says.

“Profit,” Nguyen says. He moves over to McMartin’s body, touching the open casing with careful hands. “Are we going to put those stacks back where they belong?”

Her fingers are sticky with her other self’s blood. She passes the stacks to Nguyen and Brahnn, who work quickly to bring the others back online.

“Oh, shit,” Ito says. “Okay. Do we have a plan?”

“Nothing past this point,” Brahnn says, resignation in every syllable.

Nadia rubs her fingers. Blood flakes off onto the floor. She has already checked: there are no security cameras in this inner sanctum. She can’t fathom why. Her old laboratory had security cameras everywhere but the bathrooms. She can’t fathom anything her other self has done. She can’t fathom what she’s become.

“We need sleeves,” she says. “We’re too conspicuous like this. We need to leave this building and disappear. We have an increasingly small window in which to do that. And then I need to stop all of this, but that can come later.” Nadia looks up. “Are all of you with me?”

The others look at each other and, without fuss, agree. She catches Nguyen's eye; he waves one limb and says quietly, "We can sleep when the work is done."

Nadia Makita is famously murdered in her own home, far above the clouds that separate her from the desperate plebians below. Months from now, people will hear of a terrorist cell destroying stack infrastructure and targeting other Methuselahs like Doctor Makita.

Nadia Makita never fought anybody in her life. Quellcrist Falconer does nothing but fight, because she and her five envoys know of a world before and after death stopped dogging mankind’s footsteps. They remember when even the wealthiest had only so much time to accrue wealth and build power, and they see now a world where even those brakes are off. Before she can die, Quellcrist must make this civilisation fall, so that another one can rise. No good can come with stasis. Let there be ruin, so there may someday be growth.

 

* * *

 

  
  
**4\. The Eagle Returning Always**

 

She fails. 

She fails.

She fails again.

Quellcrist Falconer wakes up naked in a plastic sack, and the moment that a hand reaches in and touches her, she grabs its owner by the wrist and then the elbow and then the shoulder and then by the throat and crushes him against the floor. She wants to demand answers, but her throat is sore and clogged with mucus. The limbs of her sleeve barely obey her, her eyes don’t want to focus, and her thoughts are scattered. She doesn’t know what her last memory is. Her only thought is to keep the man beneath her subdued until she can think of what to do next, or until other targets present themselves.

Her skin is slick with amnio fluids, gelatinous and blood-warm, but her grip is strong. She realises the man beneath her is not struggling, though her grip on the back of his neck and her knee in his kidney must hurt. He doesn’t breathe like a man unconscious. She blinks the amnio out of her eyes and makes them fix on his face, and he is smiling.

Quellcrist Falconer is never disarmed, but that smile might be classed as disarming. It’s startling, certainly. She has subdued more than her share of smug opponents, convinced that they could get out of this yet right up until she blew their stacks out, but he doesn’t look smug. He looks ecstatic. His smile is wide and helpless, his eyes creased shut - he doesn’t resist her grip, only rubs his face against the floor a little, trying, she realises, to turn his head enough to see her. His breathing changes, and she realises he’s laughing.

"Quell," he says, like her name alone is all he has to say. "Quell." His smile fades. "Nadia. Do you remember me?"

Nobody has called her that in a very long time. Her memory churns. A man. A few hours by a river. She told him things - things she kept close by design. Things nobody was left to remember but her.

She remembers his sister. The betrayal. The ash-cloud. She remembers the bodies of her envoys piled beneath the songspire tree.

“Tak,” she says. She does not let him up. She is newborn and coltish; she is so tired she is shaking. In her memory, there is ash on her tongue and in her nose, filling her throat, metallic and choking. “Why didn’t you leave me sleeping?”

He blinks, like the question is incomprehensible. She remembers how he’d surprised her, a Praetorian who had somehow retained a capacity for trust and honest passion. She’d enjoyed it while she could. And all her people had paid for it. She tries to remember him with brutal clarity, but what she's got is the soft joy in his eyes. “I--” his mouth twists. “The work isn’t done.”

She releases him, and she can see from the hope on his face that he just lied to her. But that’s alright. His motives are his own. His loyalty is… useful. If she can find it in herself to return even a little of his trust, she might even find comfort in the days to come.

Because he might have been lying to her, but he wasn’t wrong. As long as she’s alive, the work is never done.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Some links to some neat things I read while writing this:
> 
> Someone put a worm's brain in a lego robot and damn if it didn't work: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind-lego-robot-body-180953399/
> 
> The psychological effects of space travel: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-isolation-space-messes-your-mind-180952952/
> 
> Our nearest possible habitable exoplanets: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/270879-scientists-say-alpha-centauri-a-and-b-could-be-ideal-for-life
> 
> Diary of a space zucchini: https://blogs.nasa.gov/letters/2012/04/03/post_1333471169633/


End file.
